Menstration Now What Does Blood Perform?

By Berkeley Kaite

Each of the eight chapters in this volume addresses menstruation and/or menstrual blood in various media sites with a view to answering the question, what does blood perform? Menstrual blood may be enduringly feminine but it is never just one thing. Menstruation Now contains chapters on:  the shifting “conversation” of menstruation in contemporary advertising; menstrual blood and the “female complaint” in Alice Munro’s short story, “Chance”; the signification of menstrual blood in legal discourse; blood as a para-text in pornographic films; the placement of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s phantasized menstrual blood in biographies of her;  contemporary menstrual art;  menstrual blood as liminal space in Ingmar Bergman’s film Cries and Whispers; and, unruly blood in the TV show Orange is the New Black.  Blood is performative: disruptive, noisy, aesthetically fluid, difficult to discipline. It can thus, now as always, be performed again in the service of new meanings and experiences.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Demeter Press
• Release date: Apr 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781772582345

Book preview

Now

Menstruation Now

WHAT DOES BLOOD PERFORM?

edited by Berkeley Kaite

Menstruation Now

What does blood perform?

Edited by Berkeley Kaite

Copyright © 2019 Demeter Press

Individual copyright to their work is retained by the authors. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Printed and Bound in Canada

Front cover image: Untitled (from the Flower project, part one), Anna Volpi.

Front cover artwork: Michelle Pirovich

Typesetting: Michelle Pirovich

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Menstruation now : what does blood perform?

Editor: Berkeley Kaite.

Names: Kaite, Berkeley, editor.

Description: Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: Canadiana 20190066792 | ISBN 9781772581881 (softcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Menstruation—Social aspects. | LCSH: Menstrual cycle—Social aspects. | LCSH: Menstruation in literature. | LCSH: Menstruation

in motion pictures. | LCSH: Menstruation on television.

Classification: LCC GN484.38 .M46 2019 | DDC 612.6/62—dc23

I would like to acknowledge and thank Andrea O’Reilly for creating and sustaining Demeter Press and May Friedman for her work as project mentor. I am grateful for the expert and generous editorial skills of Jesse O’Reilly-Conlin. Thanks also to the reviewers of the manuscript for their helpful comments and feedback and to the contributors with whom it was a pleasure to work.

Contents

Introduction

Berkeley Kaite

Chapter One

Bloody Jackie: How Menstrual Blood Speaks for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s Silence

Berkeley Kaite

Chapter Two

Who Is That ‘She’?: Narratives of Menstruation in the Terri Schiavo Case

Claire Horn

Chapter Three

Period Porn: Menstrual Blood at the Margins

Laura Helen Marks

Chapter Four

Changing the Conversation about Menstruation from Very Personally Yours to #ItsNotMyPeriod: A Discursive Analysis of Menstrual Products and Advertisements

Cayo Gamber

Chapter Five

The Contemporary Art of Menstruation: Embracing Taboos, Breaking Boundaries, and Making Art

Barbara Kutis

Chapter Six

Menstruation and Liminality in Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers

Peter Ohlin

Chapter Seven

The Problem Was That She Was a Girl: The Female Complaint in Alice Munro’s Juliet Triptych

Kasia van Schaik

Chapter Eight

Orange Is the New Black: Menstruation, Comedy, and the Unruly Feminine

Katerina Symes

Notes on the Contributors

Introduction

Berkeley Kaite

This volume brings together textual analyses of different sites of menstrual performance. That is to say, each essay addresses menstrual blood not as an obdurate reality but as a sign with multiple connotations. Blood is a fluid. However, it is also meta-phorically fluid: blood is not only one thing but is volatile (Grosz) in its leakiness and, thus, in its ability to threaten boundaries, borders, and binaries.

Blood itself signifies differently depending on its embodied contexts. Receive a paper cut and you’ll lick the blood off your finger. However, Germaine Greer asks in The Female Eunuch (1970), if you think you are emancipated, you might consider the idea of tasting your menstrual blood—if it makes you sick, you’ve a long way to go, baby (57). Note Greer’s appropriation of 1970s feminist rhetoric. Eman-cipation belongs to second-wave discourses of liberation, freedom, and unrestraint of all kinds. In addition, commerce also belongs to the discourse of emancipation. Greer paraphrases the caption from a print ad for a cigarette marketed for women, Virginia Slims. In a nod to equality of the sexes, the cigarette was designed for the female and feminine consumer. It’s slender; size matters. This series of ads featured comparisons between the trapped life of a nineteenth- or early-twentieth-century woman—who had to hide her cigarettes in her garter—and her modern counterpart, who can now smoke in public. The accompanying slogan is you’ve come a long way, baby. Here, Greer wants to foreground a feminist appreciation of menstrual blood and to re-embody it through the invitation to taste it. But while that invitation acknowledges the idea of tasting menstrual blood may make you feel sick, it also urges that one get over that revulsion and try it. Greer suggests that embodiment, nausea in particular, and politics go together. Blood is never just one thing. It is performative.

The teenage ritual of cutting wrists and then mixing the blood through the rubbing together of those bleeding veins—and becoming blood sisters or brothers—is seen as benign and quaint, besides the hysteria surrounding the sharing of blood tainted by the HIV virus. Blood and belonging, blood ties—these words invoke the concept of the threshold, both the threshold of inside and outside and the body as threshold itself. The first binary of inside and outside means that blood of any kind exists inside the body but only after it exits—through a vein, a nose, a vagina—does it manifest as a sign. However, blood manifests not just one sign: blood is a signifier with several signifieds. A second binary posits the (presumed natural) body against culture. But blood helps us understand what Elizabeth Grosz argues is the body itself as a threshold—the pivotal point where cultural negotiations are both worked out and inscribed (23). The body, Grosz writes, hovers perilously and undecidably at the pivotal point of binary pairs… neither—while also being both—the private or the public, self or other, natural or cultural, psychical or social, instinctual or learned, genetically or environmentally determined (23). Grosz uses the Möbius strip as a model for the irreducibility of both the body’s obdurate particulars and how they are represented and understood. The materials of embodiment and their cultural signification are inseparable and mutually inflected. Blood within this conception is a fluid that attest(s) to the permeability of the body, its necessary dependence on an outside (193). So while blood may seem to belong in the body, and in this case, a woman’s body, when a cis-woman’s uterine lining builds towards its monthly slow release, that fluid is charged with many disciplinary manoeuvres—material, linguistic, and symbolic. Although the average monthly flow consists of around a quarter of a cup of blood, contemporary ads for so-called feminine hygiene products invoke fluids as a feminine danger: overwhelming, uncontrollable, and massive in volume. In one recent ad for Always Infinity napkins, a tornado has morphed into a sea-blue cone of water and is poised to penetrate a sanitary napkin. The caption reads: Your heavy days are going down (The Last). In another ad for the same product, a napkin shaped as an umbrella shields another sanitary napkin. Raindrops are in the background. The caption says Stay dry during downpours. A third ad for this brand mimics the graphics of a televised weather report with a weekly flowcast from Monday to Friday (25% spotting; 50% moderate flow, etc.). An icon of a cloud with plump raindrops accompanies Thursday’s 85% overnight flow (Case Studies). Appropriately, the product is called Always, as in you are always full of effluvia and which threatens a deluge without warning. Or, in the words of a contemporary ad for Stayfree, The Hoover Dam has a better chance of springing a leak (Jack’s Story).

The assumption is that cis-women are effluent and bloody emissions need a dam to staunch them—only a dam could do the job of stopping the relentless menstrual flow. The language used in this ad partakes of the discourse of emancipation Germaine Greer invoked in 1970, but it lands on the other side of a binary. Greer has her readers challenging ingrained feelings about their menstrual blood. Stayfree, on the other hand, has consumers challenging that blood itself. The language of defense (as the best offence) is invoked: the Stayfree maxi pad offers leak protection … with 18 anti-leak channels… an anti-leak core. It is a revolutionary triple defense system. The mobilization of militaristic language and imagery goes beyond Greer’s defiant entreaty though it isn’t new. In the mid-1960s, Kotex, had safety shields— 2 of them (Why Do?).

New Freedom builds a better maxi with "moisture-trap protection … with 15 extra-absorbent layers that trap wetness in millions of tiny pockets. It is advertised as helping to keep your clothes dry with a 3-sided stain shield (New Freedom). The euphemistic moisture and wetness (i.e., blood) are equated with a stain. One’s clothes are in need of protection. And although wetness is equated with the feminine, it is also aggressive in its assumptive capacity to tarnish the wearer’s clothing and, to be sure, the wearer. Indeed, the Carefree ads from the early 1980s contain the slogan for the fresh-dressed woman anytime! (1980). The militaristic language—Carefree Essentials, a pantiliner, offers double barrier protection—finds its way in the slyly humorous short story by Alice Munro, Chance. The heroine copes with her period while on a long train ride, and the narrator has her searching for reinforcements."

Fortification is in the air—a militaristic stance whether against one’s feelings, one’s cultural norms, or one’s body, especially its emissions. And here, in the name of fashion, a fresh dressed model is pictured in different outfits, always white. The clothes are fortified against immanent bloodstains. The products offer protection from the apparently massive monthly flow that requires a product to pull moisture in, trap it deep, and hold it in millions of tiny pockets (1953 Kotex).

Reinforcements also refer to an emotional stance—the ever-ready position of defense against a surprise attack. But who might be surprised? The subject who bleeds, yes; but also, potentially, those around her. A most unwelcome surprise, the unruly feminine characterized by the capriciousness of blood (and vice versa) cannot be pinned down and is unstable in her effects. That volatility by its nature requires others be fortified against it/her. Reinforcement— invoking a boundary and a binary—is in the air. The subject herself is assumed to require protection against the inevitable menstrual flow and the presumption of its unsettling qualities. She is assumed to require reinforcement against the gaze of the other: a 1941 ad for Tampax has the caption sharp eyes cannot tell (Sharp Eyes). Others’ eyes are the visual speculum to accompany this new kind of internal protection. The introduction of tampons corresponded with the mass participation of women in wage labour during the Second World War (Kaite). That is, with greater participation in public life and with greater interaction with other people came the issue of self-discipline—the impulse, if not need, to put oneself under surveillance. In 1942, a series of ads for Meds, the modern tampon, features sketches of women engaged in jobs for the war effort—for example, a military nurse, an airplane mechanic, and a mechanic in military uniform changing the hubcap on a tire (A Woman’s Plight).

The effects of the circulation of the menstruating subject in public require its regulation (i.e., the internal surveillance of feminine blood). And although few would dispute the benefits and practicality of the tampon, it’s the language that overdetermines the symbolic utility of these products. Meds contains a safety centre, the notation of which is accompanied by a drawing of a tampon with an arrow pointing to the visually amplified interior, for effect. What/who is safe here? Whose safety is a concern, and from what? This anxiety is given sharper eyes in an ad from the 1970s for Demure, a vaginal deodorant, which describes the product as a necessity for women whose days involve meeting people, visiting places, and doing things. People, places, and things must be safe from feminine interiority and all that it contains, reveals, and obscures and all that it may potentially release: it is a frightening unknown, a place to be filled with meanings (ellipses in other words).

Interiority, while literally silent, is metaphorically on the cusp of something. The enigma of this amorphous space is one half of the inside-outside binary; it is made to speak and to transgress its boundary in a variety of euphemisms. It’s a cliché that menstruation and menstrual blood are taboo and subject to suppression and all manner of silences. However, the discursive construction of the menstruating subject is noisy—if one invokes a problematic binary of silence-noise—even if the noise is oblique, told slant (to borrow from Emily Dickinson), and employs verbal and visual euphemisms. Beginning in the late 1940s and continuing through to the early 1960s, Modess sanitary napkins had a campaign whose slogan contained only two words, phrased thusly: "Modess … because. Note the rules of punctuation and style, all that might be packed into the ellipses and all that is suggested with the italics. And the word because."

Ellipses contain all the words and assumed blood that strain to leak out—the humble period, three in a row because one is not enough, three periods that stand in for the period. The ellipsis both abbreviates and expands: it aims for conciseness for it elides what is not said, and it invites imprecise filling in. Ellipsis comes from the Greek elleipsis, meaning defect or to fall short. In print, ellipses signify the intentional omission of words, a change of thought, a lapse in time, an incomplete construction. Grammatical ellipses both invite completion and deny that possibility at the same time. They take up (empty) space and time so there is a kind of free-flowing possibility of a conclusion. However, one falls short of a conclusion, as the three suggestive dots threaten to move madly off in all directions. Elusiveness is built into ellipses. It is a rather fitting convention when talking of blood, women, and, especially, feminine blood. Elizabeth Grosz reminds us of two things pertinent to this discussion: Woman (uppercase and in the singular) remains philosophy’s eternal enigma, its mysterious and inscrutable object (4). And, following Luce Irigaray, the disquiet about blood as viscous, half-formed, or the indeterminate has to do with the cultural unrepresentability of fluids within prevailing models of ontology, their implicit association with femininity, with maternity, with the corporeal, all elements sub-ordinated to the privilege of the self-identical, the one, the unified, the solid (Grosz 195). Ellipses perfectly invoke the unrepresentable and the unsayable, not to say unspeakable. The ellipsis is both/and: things will not be uttered yet are strained to be heard. They say, Use your imagination…

Italics emphasize. They put an accent on the word by drawing attention to it. Originally used as an adjective to refer to something of Italy, it is employed typically with foreign words and phrases or to set off a book title. Italics announce and command attention; putting the stress on a foreign word, a word that is spoken by others or that cannot be translated, suggests a je ne sais quoi. What cannot be translated with precision, and so is left in its original form and then italicized, suggests there is a struggle over meaning. Even though because is not a foreign phrase, it is laconic. What would it say if it could speak?

Because is a conjunction and a conjunction joins similar things together. Here, because joins a few things: the product’s name (there is no image of the Modess napkin in the ad), a woman in beautiful repose, decked out in a high-end evening gown (Because Modess), the name itself connoting modesty. Yet what is modest here in this overt pose? Is it of a model in a studied display of wealth, leisure, and glamour? The name Modess and the word modesty both contain the root mode from its Indo-European origin, meaning to measure. Embedded in the ad itself are the oblique features of an elliptical flow: though acknowledging the hidden presence of menstrual blood (even then the viewer does not know if this woman is supposed to be menstruating right now, in that dress, on this evening), its aesthetic details are finely and firmly in place, contained, still, frozen and measured. Blood here threatens impulsively to defile this image of immaculateness and is at the same time—indeed, due to its seeping and engulfing—held at bay, trapped by the product in waiting. Both/and are at play, much like the feminine figure that reveals the fraudulence of binary categories.

Gloria Steinem famously wrote that if men could menstruate they would brag about how long and how much (338). Instead, cis women menstruate, and that fact is dressed up in euphemism (euphemizein: to use words of good omen). Blood is everywhere, and it is not the case that its presence is suppressed, or only suppressed. Menstrual blood works its unruly way, along with the gendered body that is fashioned to contain it, into connotation. (Practically skipping denotation—blood is viscous, but beyond that, euphemisms abound.) An ad series for Kotex from the 1950s contains the caption not a shadow of a doubt (1953 Kotex). Here too, as with the Modess ads mentioned above, the ideal model/consumer is featured in fashionable garb, and there are people in the background who look at her. She is in others’ purview, and she knows it. In each ad, in small print, there is information about the clothes she is wearing, the designer, and the cost. This is a measured statement about fashion and the fashioning of the menstruating subject in public. What is in doubt here? What is the doubt that seems to hover precariously, invoked through its denial? A poetic discussion of this would playfully move between metaphors of certainty and hesitation. I will venture only to say that doubt is in the air. Doubt: from dubious which has duo and to be at its root. To be two